J-Anus of the Social Media

Few words about two-faced Janus of media. Social Media of how we have seen them since Web 2.0 revolution and “dot-com crash” has changed a lot. The world expected Social Media changing the Media on its throne – we’ve got Social Media becoming yet another Media.

The creation of internet has given us a hope, that while traditional media will remain offline – the new era of media will grow itself separately because of easier access to the communications and distribution of content. After the significant change of capabilities and accessibility of it, corporations have taken over the online media as well – so they just moved online from offline partially.

Web 2.0 was loud and fun, Facebook and Twitter were pioneers, but still not real Social Media yet – they have evolved pretty quickly. They caught their time on the rise. Investment rounds, revenues, online advertisement to keep the product free was just a frame for the next step of evolution – Big Data.

We approved the right of social media to sell our profile – sales profile, ad profile, a profile of barely everything. And even we don’t get a part of it. Of course, privacy policies, law wars against it will take part as they do now, but it is impossible to prohibit something that we are committed to ourselves without a pressure.

Where is the second face of Janus? Social Media became just a regular Media, by the set of attributes:

we don’t choose what we see – it is manipulated

we don’t own the content we produce – we gave it away

our identity and profiles are not secure – we have shared them

we don’t pay for service? no, we do – more then we think

So what is the difference between old-school media and modern Social Media? Maybe time for a change?